by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The Lost is simultaneously polished and crude. For all intents and purposes, it's a direct-to-video release*, and it has a "direct-to-video" vibe to it. There's a broadness to the acting, to put it delicately. It's not that these are bad actors, exactly, it's just that their performances are superficial. I want to say that they lack the nuance of what you'd get in a theatrical feature, but I'm beginning to wonder if there is something about the very nature of the "theatrical film" that is more accommodating of excess. That perhaps the very size of a theatrically-released film can dwarf an over-actor and make the severity of his or her offense somewhat less significant, whereas if a film goes straight-to-DVD, it becomes more performance-oriented. It seems that it's really hard to find camp in a theatrical release and it's really hard to avoid it in dtv product. I don't know whether this is me the viewer projecting something from outside the film--I guess it must be, as I wouldn't imagine that most filmmakers actually intend their movies to bypass the big screen altogether. But wherever it comes from, it's there.

by Walter Chaw A childhood favourite, Fred Dekker's Night of the Creeps generally underscores the danger of revisiting childhood favourites with a jaundiced eye; this and his sophomore feature, The Monster Squad, show that Dekker was rejected from the USC and UCLA film schools for a reason. I realize it's all supposed to be a cozy, funny-scary homage to the terribleness of low-budget B-movies as a genre unto themselves, but the picture is terribly edited and disastrously paced--the very things that effectively kill both comedy and horror. Unconvinced? The first misstep might be its choice to leave a charming, 1950s-set black-and-white prologue in favour of a faux-Hughesian '80s fandango that, like most of the era's mainstream teen dramas not made by John Hughes, lacks an ear for how we actually talked, and insight into how we actually felt. In any case, it's hopelessly incongruous to go from Ozzie & Harriet to leg-warmers and Wall of Voodoo, resulting in something that isn't a spoof of bad filmmaking so much as an example of it. Night of the Creeps joins The Goonies for me as one of those cult classics I just can't wrap my head around. I remember sort of loving it when I was twelve, meaning only that twelve-year-olds are idiots.

by Alex Jackson SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Gregory Dark started out directing adult films--I've been told that his award-winning Let Me Tell Ya 'Bout White Chicks is a classic of the miscegenation genre--and had moved up to music videos when he was offered See No Evil, his first feature film (as well as the first film produced under the WWE banner). The idea that Dark sees this movie as his ticket to the big leagues is as good an explanation as any for its smarmy tone. Still embarrassed about making a slasher picture (and, by extension, his stigmatic beginnings), he distances himself from the material by condescending to it: If he's better than B-movie claptrap, then that means he's an A-list filmmaker, right? I have no idea where Dark wants to be near the end of his career, but the attitude he brings to See No Evil is that of a climber and not of a serious artist who happens to be relegated to the periphery of the mainstream.

by Jefferson Robbins Was it that the flicks got less suspenseful, or that I got savvier? Joseph Zito's The Prowler boasts an intimidating slasher (although "stabber" or "puncturer" is more apt, since he tends to pitchfork and bayonet his victims to death), a complement of gore F/X from the estimable Tom Savini, a compelling backstory that touches on the legacy of war, and a Final Girl (Vicky Dawson) who's fleet, smart, next-door pretty, and resourceful. Its closest equivalent is probably Friday the 13th Part 2, released just six months prior, which likewise coped with horror passed down through the generations. What it lacks, though, is tension and surprise--at least in retrospect. There are no real shocks to be had, beyond the graphic nature of the killings and the choice to open a scare flick with stock '40s newsreel footage.

by Jefferson Robbins Few things give me the willies like the sublimation of self. The idea that my essential me-ness could someday drain away and be lost--to injury, dementia, what have you--makes me shudder. At the extreme, there's the fear that some invading force, a me supplanted by a not-me, might subjugate my personality. Little wonder that Brian O'Blivion's monologue in Videodrome about communicating with his own brain cancer, or almost any mind-control scenario scripted for comics by Grant Morrison, can set me cringing.

by Walter Chaw Early in The Wicker Man, poor Sergeant Howie of the West Highland Police shows the picture of a missing lass to a gaggle of locals on remote Summerisle Island. As he turns away, having received no information of value, the camera crops his head off. Later, during a pagan May Day festival, Sergeant Howie nearly gets his head cut off again, this time by six swords forming an interlaced sun symbol. The loss of the head represents castration (Sergeant Howie is shown to be impotent from the start), one of literally dozens of symbols both overt and subtle employed in this unique and brilliant genre film.

by Vincent Suarez You know the feeling: too many movies, too little time. You walk down the corridor of your local multiplex, relishing the titles on the marquees and posters, and you know that many will unfortunately have to be seen on home video. If you're lucky, you'll make wise choices, but, occasionally, your home viewing includes that film you regret not seeing theatrically. For me, Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas (hereafter Nightmare) is one of those films. Having grown weary of Burton's quirkiness after the disappointing Batman Returns, I passed up Nightmare in favour of movies I now cannot recall; what a shame. Fortunately, Touchstone's optical disc presentations of this magnificent film (the previous LaserDiscs and last year's DVD release) provide more than a glimpse of what was surely a wonderful theatrical experience.

by Alex Jackson Cinematically at least, I view the 1980s as being an entirely pro-cultural period. Black became mainstream--everybody listened to music from black artists and watched films and television shows starring black actors. Gay became mainstream, blurring gender lines. Feminism likewise became mainstream, blurring gender roles. Blacks, gays, and women were not necessarily disenfranchised in the culture during the 1970s, but by the 1980s they defined the dominant culture, creating a new status quo. The '80s were not a carbon copy of the 1950s, rather they were the 1950s dragged through the '60s and '70s; it was essentially a period of multicultural homogenization. There was, then, never a proper counterculture or fringe element. Nobody was an outsider and nobody was "other." Similarly, there was no feeling of liberation, as there was nothing to be liberated from.

by Walter Chaw Masaki Kobayashi's 1962 masterpiece Harakiri is the height
of austere--almost Noh--Japanese filmmaking. It lands somewhere between Ozu's
pillow flicks and Kurosawa's Throne of Blood, and, of course, as Kobayashi
is the auteur behind the Human Condition trilogy, that martial
austerity, that antiestablishment mien, is to be expected, if impossible to ever
truly gird oneself against. It's set in 1630, at the end of feudal Japan,
when collapsing fiefdoms mean throngs of ronin overflowing into the
countryside and, occasionally, asking for the right to commit ritual suicide in
an "honourable" courtyard. Tsugumo is one such samurai, but before
he's granted the privilege of dragging a sword across his belly, House of Iyi counsellor
Saito insists on telling him of a previous penitent, Chijiiwa, who claimed he
wanted to kill himself but only really wanted a handout. Seeking to make an
example of Chijiiwa and the effrontery he represents to the Bushido code, the
Iyi clan decides to force the issue--even after it's revealed that Chijiiwa
has, somewhere along the way, pawned his iron for a bamboo stick with a hilt.
It's a kind of torture, and everyone watches. Kobayashi goes into flashback,
unexpectedly, telling the story of the young samurai we, at first, are
complicit in mocking. We participate in his torture. We believe he
deserves it. By the end of the film, we don't believe that anymore.

by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The animalism, the absolute withering upheaval of the "feminized"
Victorian-novel tradition, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights has long
been one of my favourite books. What's never been properly captured in its
myriad film adaptations is the earthiness that tethers its gothic, sometimes
supernatural, trappings. Neither guilty pleasure nor bodice-ripper, it's a
wallow, a traipse through high heather that only hides the wet
suck of the moors, and damned if it doesn't, when all's said and done, project
something like a masculine gaze in its positioning of brooding, demonic
Heathcliff at its centre. It's a romance--a destructive, devouring romance
constructed all of regrets and unconsummated desire; and Andrea Arnold's wise,
visceral take on it is the underbelly of Jane Campion's brilliant Bright
Star. Together, they would construct a poetic whole: the Romanticist yin of
Bright Star to Wuthering Heights' roaring Victorian yang. Arnold's
film is so good, in fact, that it clarifies how it is that Romanticism, through
Victorianism, eventually becomes Emerson's Naturalism and then, ultimately, Modernism. It's a continuum, isn't it, and Wuthering Heights
is the missing link in a very particular Darwin chart. The excitement of it for
me is that it's an example, pure and new, that film at its best is poetry.

by Walter Chaw Let's talk about hats--fedoras, in particular, and how they evolved from the image of the hard-boiled detective in the American noir cycle into the chapeau-of-choice for Coppola's gangsters in the anti-hero '70s. How Harrison Ford's Deckard from Blade Runner was originally conceived with one of the hats to go with his trench coat before Raiders of the Lost Ark made an American icon out of Ford's swashbuckling archaeologist Indiana Jones, and how that didn't stop child-killing child-molester Freddy Krueger from getting a fedora (singed and blood-stained, but so was Indy's) in 1984--the same year, as it happens, that Steven Spielberg and George Lucas turned their American icon into the star of his own horror movie with Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The relationship between Americans and the hats their heroes wear is a complicated one. A Freudian would offer that hats are tumescent--the loci of masculine power, a metaphor for the penis/head--and that losing a hat is the equivalent of castration. My favourite example of that theory in practice is Joel McCrea losing his in a field of windmills to the trilling, mocking laughter of ladylove Laraine Day in Foreign Correspondent. The Coen Brothers make it a throughline in Miller's Crossing, too, as Tom loses and reclaims his hat in cycles of power and powerlessness. I think it means something in the fourth Indiana Jones flick that evil Russkie Spalko tips Indy's hat up on his head in an attempt to read his mind instead of knocking it off entirely.

October 14, 2012

****/**** Image A- Sound A Extras D+starring Robert Redford, Kristin Scott Thomas, Sam Neill, Scarlett Johanssonscreenplay by Eric Roth and Richard LaGravenese, based on the novel by Nicholas Evansdirected by Robert Redford

click any image to enlarge

by Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Revisiting Robert Redford's The Horse Whisperer fourteen years after I last saw it, I am relieved to encounter a film that isn't simply marking time until a climactic moment that was for me a cherished eureka at the movies. The picture begins with Grace (13-year-old Scarlett Johansson) rising at the crack of dawn to go horseback riding with her friend Judith (Kate Bosworth, billed as "Catherine"). Redford focuses on Johansson's socked feet slinking past her parents' bedroom door, and subsequently draws a lot of attention to legs and feet here--not in a fetish-y way, but as if they're a person's "tell." I misremembered this scene, for what it's worth, as Grace doing something wrong by sneaking out, but in fact her parents are not at all surprised to find her gone by the time they're up and around. Mom (Kristin Scott Thomas) is basically Anna Wintour--her name's even Annie--and Dad, Robert (Sam Neill), is, we infer, the kind of lawyer who does a lot of pro bono work.